The Winter Olympics will be held in Sochi, Russia, exactly a year from Thursday. But the question remains: Will there be winter?

The United States' slopestyle skiers were scheduled to leave for Sochi on Thursday, excited to compete in a World Cup event and test out the Olympic course. Then they got word the event was cancelled "due to the due to lack of snow and continuous warm and rainy weather conditions," the International Ski Federation (FIS) said. The halfpipe and skicross events are still on.

"The lows overnight have been like 45. So there's no snow," U.S. slopestyle skier Keri Herman told USA TODAY Sports on Tuesday. Slopestyle skiing, in which athletes perform tricks on a series of jumps, rails, boxes and other features of a manmade slopestyle course, will make its Olympic debut in Sochi.

If there's snow, that is.

Sochi, a resort city along the coast of the Black Sea, is hosting the first Winter Olympics in a subtropical region. Which is why there's palm trees on the coast against the backdrop of snow-covered peaks.

"I figured if they had the Winter Olympics, they would have snow," Herman said with a laugh. "It's kind of a shock to me. This sport, even though it's new to the world, we've been doing it a long time. You don't really throw a contest unless you know you can build some jumps."

Last weekend U.S. Nordic combined skiers competed in a blizzard in a test event at the venue in Krasnaya Polyana. Billy Demong, an Olympic medalist in 2010, praised the RusSki Gorki venue.

"We are storing snow from the previous season to use at the venues," Dmitry Chernyshenko, chair of the organizing committee, said in December. "During the World Cup in ski jumping, we successfully tested the system."